FOOD AS MEDICINE
Part 1
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine….”
Research has shown that rearing animals on a diet of purified, processed food devoid of all minerals and mostly empty in vitamins, sustained them in ‘normal’ health but not in optimum health. The animals will grow and show no disease or deficiencies……until adulthood. Dental problems, constipation, poor gut health with massive amounts of harmful bacteria, loss of calcium from bones and degenerative diseases was then presented. No amount of vitamin supplements reversed these conditions, only lots of fresh raw food, given early enough.
It has been proven by research that it is the same for humans
To me it became a logical fact. We, and our bodies did not start out, eons ago, with the foods that we eat today. That is, and I use the word ‘food’ here for lack of another word…. huge amounts of meat, processed foods, refined flour and sugar filled baked stuffs, preservative and msg laden products, fizzy drinks with all sorts of added ‘energy’ boosters, canned products.
In Glimpses of God, I wrote extensively about the impact of society’s excessive meat-eating habits on the animals, the planet, the human body and the vibrational effect it creates, as well as on the energy vibrations of foods. The same for modern allopathic medicine.
All I am going to repeat is that health and healing happens in Body, Mind and Soul. You cannot treat just one. Even if I have a client that presents with a life challenge and not something like depression or cancer, I still look at and treat body mind and soul. It always includes lifestyle and food. You just cannot separate them if you want to heal, be healthy or cope with whatever is happening in your life.
In this series I am concentrating on the medicinal and other benefits of certain foods.
A car needs petrol to keep going, so does animal and human bodies.
Emotional and physical symptoms is the body’s way of signaling for help.
Allopathic medicine just suppresses these symptoms.
Research (and simple logical thinking…) indicates that how and what we eat affect health, it also shows that changes in how and what we eat significantly affect health.
Improve nutrition, improve health. Even just cutting down on processed foods, sugar, alcohol, fat and caffeine will already improve health relatively quickly. Changes will show up as lower levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, lower blood pressure, a better immune system. It will change how you look and feel, vitality and energy levels. (nutrition contributes significantly to depression and anxiety). Add in adequate and regular exercise, sunlight and drinking enough clean water, and health will improve more.
Between 50 000 and 100 000 different chemicals are used in the running of the body. These essential nutrients need each other to do their jobs and keep the body functioning. There are similarities between human blood and substances found in nature. Blood serum has a composition similar to sea water and hemoglobin has a molecular structure that closely resembles the plant pigment chlorophyll.
Again, I have written in my book about how and why the body recognizes and can use natural “living” food. (and plant medicine). Also, on what is inherent in natural raw plant food.
Cooking and processing destroy and interferes with the structural information that raw foods carry.
The same goes for animals – the “food” bought off shelves in supermarkets and the over-processed, expensive food bought in the form of pellets is causing much, much harm to our animals. They need natural food as much as we do.
Our bodies need plant natural food in its original state i.e. not cooked and processed to death, but raw or at the very least, lightly steamed. Apart from veggies and fruit, natural plant food includes raw nuts and seeds and sprouts. Grains and legumes on a smaller scale. Fermented foods are crucial for our gut health.
I have seen too many animal and human clients with nutritional deficiencies (even scurvy!), malnutrition, under-nutrition, degenerative diseases and even disorders of the psyche, to not believe that we have veered away from what our bodies have been programmed with – the food it knows it needs and expects. Our bodies know what it needs on a cellular level, indeed on all levels.
Together with emotional causes, there is deprivation of nutrition on a cellular level, then gradual failure of the immune system and then dis-ease. The benefits of a high-raw plant diet are on a spiritual, mental and physical level. (this also ties in with how it manifests in our energetic bodies – more in my online workshop: Know your Body, Know Yourself). Food will even influence our behavior.
Modern society lives on high quantity, high protein foods – meat, fish, poultry and dairy products- and massive quantities of sugar and refined flour. Well-balanced meals are not the usual meat, rice and potatoes…. with a side salad…. or an over-cooked veggie…. followed by a dessert made with flour, heaps of sugar, cream.
Cooking (this goes for microwaving as well, and I believe using a microwave to be detrimental to health in other ways too), particularly at high temperatures, do not just destroy many essential nutrients, but can alter the nature of food proteins, fats and fiber and make them harmful to the body. In my book I discuss the cooking of meat and the low and non-existence of nutrients in modern dairy products.
Vitamin C and the B-vitamins are sensitive to heat and they leach out of food when it is bleached and boiled. Cooked cabbage loses 75% of its Vitamin C content. The A vitamins are destroyed at high temperatures. Up to 50% of Vitamin E can be destroyed by frying or baking.
Commercially frozen vegetables, refined and processed grains, canning and preserving contain nothing to very little vitamins, minerals and all the other necessary components.
The molecular structure of fats heated to high temperatures changes to such a degree that it becomes poisonous and even carcinogenic. Valuable fatty acids are changed into trans fats that the body cannot use. (convenience foods really are “junk” food).
Then we do not even add in the preservatives, colorants and other chemicals added into and onto food.
Do we still wonder why we become ill?
In Part 2 I will continue with raw foods and their benefits as food and medicine.